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Wednesday, 20 February 2013

Pagans And Quakers

Hello bloggers!This week is Moot week. A moot is a meeting of pagans and my local moot in Bolton meets every third Tuesday of the month. Yesterday we had been invited by our local Quakers to their Friends Meeting House to join in with their study group and discuss our faiths with them. The plan was for a few of our moot members to give a short talk on 'What Paganism Means To Me' and a few of the Quakers to give a short talk on 'What Quakerism Means To Me', followed by an open discussion on the points raised.As it turned out the Quakers were an inquisitive bunch and very interested in hearing more about Paganism. They asked so many questions we only had time to hear from one of them. But that gives us all a great excuse to do it again sometime, so we can hear more about Quakerism. I didn't really know anything about Quakers and I had this idea that they were puritanical Christians. Well they may have been puritanical Christians back in the 18th Century, but that couldn't be further from the truth today. Quakers have no doctrine or rules about what you must believe to consider yourself a Quaker, and so as a group their belief systems were as wide and varied as our Pagan ones. In fact we found a lot of common ground between our group and theirs, much more I think than any of us was expecting. Based on my experience of yesterday I'd say that Quakers are very open-minded, peaceful and tolerant people. They gave us the warmest of welcomes to their Meeting House and the study group session was interesting, informative and a real eye-opener for many of us, both Quakers and Pagans alike. I'd feel very comfortable attending one of their services and will definitely give it a go at some point. And I hope some of them will come to one of our celebration rituals in the future. I think they would, now that we have dispelled the misconception that our rituals are all naked orgies and chicken sacrifices.